Ai Pin's question: What is the condition of the new generation of AI Phone?

The first device born purely for ChatGPT is very imperfect. But it has been out of the garbage time of boring mobile games, as well as the entire mobile Internet era

Text/Wisdom

Ai Pin is the kind of typical, natural iPhone killer.

- Founder Imran Chaudhri was swept away from Apple by Jony Ive 5 years ago. At the time, he mentioned in an email to his Apple colleagues that he felt his inspiration was drying up.

As the designer of the Multi Touch, swipe unlock and the owner of some of the patents, Chaudhri's departure is symbolic, and he is seen by some Apple fans as a symbol of the lack of innovation in Cook's Apple.

——The core of Ai Pin is OpenAI's GPT multi-round dialogue, which is generated from the recommendation system, while the business core of iPhone and Android is search and bidding ranking, which is also the commercial core of the mobile Internet in the past 20 years.

The AI era replaces the mobile Internet, and the Rank of content and services replaces the Page Rank of Google Kid, and AI Phone is here.

The Ai Pin is not a perfect, qualified phone

In today's garbage time in the era of smartphones, Ai Pin may not be the best smartphone, or it may not be a good enough AI phone, or even destined to be a big seller. However, the significance of such a device is that it can no longer be defined by a Smart Phone that can take photos and surf the Internet.

At this moment, this is the germ of the AI hardware era, and this should be the biggest opportunity for another generation of entrepreneurial heroes in the next 20 years - to put on a well-fitting hardware body, cars, mobile phones, headphones, and various robots for the most beautiful software of the new generation, Chat GPT.

Damn Multi-Touch

In a previous article, Humane touched on the background of the company, which was founded five years ago by a couple from Apple, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno.

In the years since its founding, Humane has been operating in a very secret state. In addition to the founders and his wife, there are dozens of engineers from Apple and Google.

Humane's website has a detailed profile of their core employees, which is an interesting practice. Someone mentioned that Humane has employed about 200 people in total, of which more than 90 are from Apple, and there should be some interesting stories behind it.

Tripp Mickle, a technology correspondent for The New York Times, mentioned Imran Chaudhri in his book about Apple, and in 2017, he wrote to his colleagues that he had run out of ideas.

According to Tripp Mickle, Chaudhri's statement angered Jony Ive, the god of gods, and swept him away. Bethany Bongiorno, who is the project director of Imran Chaudhri, also left Apple.

However, after the establishment of Humane, the couple once appeared in a media report, in addition to introducing Humane, the description of the two seemed to be about when to leave the successful company, purely inspirational chicken soup, seemingly actively choosing to leave.

Tripp Mickle has a tradition of writing that exaggerates facts. But Imran Chaudhri, in a TED talk just a few months ago, mentioned his true intentions, and his pride in his participation in Multi-Touch, but also his remorse — billions of people around the world are addicted to their phone screens, especially video and social networks today.

Among them, there are also tech heroes like Elon Musk, who used social networks as their daily offices, and eventually, were forced to buy social networks.

A closer look at Chaudhri's several speeches suggests that he has a heavy responsibility to turn society around by pulling society away from this screen-based dependence.

Because of this, he also believes that AR/VR virtual reality equipment should not become a computing platform for the next era, this virtual reality equipment will only make everyone more dependent on the "screen" and the network, and will become another barrier between people and the world.

The overlooked information is that Jony Ive, his former employer, who ousted him from Apple, has actually held the same sentiment over the past few years.

It is rumored that this is also the reason why he gave up working with Apple in the field of Vision Pro, the Apple team wants to launch a glasses as soon as possible, and the gods of the gods want to wait for this glasses to be perfect, perfect is not only technology, but also to be able to take into account the possible impact of such a device on society, not to let digital devices continue to besiege users, cut off users, but to develop users, enhance communication between people.

The heroes of the Jobs era were the full development and use of technology, and in the post-Jobs era, these former successful people seem to want to guide the balance of technology and society.

The biggest difference between North American entrepreneurs and Eastern entrepreneurs is that most of them come from lifestyle and concept pursuits, rather than pure business pursuits.

For the topic of screen dependence and addiction, it is an overly ambitious topic, but at present, for AI Phone, leaving the screen and purely voice interaction is too heavy and difficult burden.

The road to Ai PIN is destined to be difficult, with high hardware prices, and service subscription prices, and a huge gap from popular and popular hardware. In addition, Ai Pin is not like the first generation of iPhone, there was a huge Mac ecology at the beginning of its birth, and the iTunes ecosystem interacts and inherits, Ai Pin wants to replace the entire mobile Internet hardware alone, it is more like Google Glass.

Ai Pin is really not a smartphone in the typical sense of the word, his creator created it in order to kill the iPhone and transform the iPhone generation. However, judging by the results and the market's reaction, its value may not be to replace the iPhone, but to lure the iPhone down the right new path, reminding iPhones and Androids that it is now garbage time for smartphones.

The condition of the AI Phone and the disappearance of the computer

Smart Thing has been anticipating the impact of Ai Pin for a long time, and over the past few weeks, we've been patiently following the progress of the so-called Sam Altman, Jony Ive, and Son conspiracy, as well as feedback on the launch of Ai Pin, as well as Android's actions.

Brief summary: Jony Ive, Masayoshi Son, and Sam Altman's current partnership is at a very early stage.

"Zhiwu" agrees with the ancient adage in the history of science and technology, perfect hardware is the crystallization of the best software in the past, and this is not the case, but the current state of ChatGPT is still too early to be truly mature.

Computing devices are getting smaller and smaller, and they will eventually become ubiquitous

Is it time for Jony Ive to be confident and to make a move now?Is it time to perfectly encapsulate Chat GPT into a mobile phone? This has been a very serious question that has plagued "Smart Things" for the past few years.

Ai Pin showed the combat power and direction. The App Store model, that is, the advertising machine model, has come to an end, and now it should be a starting point from the era of PPC search, entering the text recommendation technology, and finally ending in the era of smart services.

Ai Pin is a qualified guide. It removes the App Store and turns decentralized applications into conversational services, which is the starting point of AI Phone.

An investor in Humane, in an interview with the media, mentioned such a line of thinking, which is not an accidental coincidence, it is a premeditated and profound plan.

From this point of view alone, the Ai Pin is very much like the iPhone of 2007. In Chaudhri's lecture "Vanishing Computing", he shared his feelings and explained the outline and mission of Ai Pin.

He believes that the next generation of smart devices can enhance the interaction between users and the world, hear what you hear, see what you see, integrate into the user's life, and users can take advantage of the power of computing technology when they get along with their surroundings.

Screenless, seamless, ubiquitous, powerful perception. Chaudhri agrees with Dr. Mok's 2017 article that the technology of the future will become an intangible, vanishing computing technology.

To summarize the path and philosophy of Ai Pin in one sentence, the invisible computing power can help users better integrate into the environment and the real world. Judging from the first Ai Pin, it is indeed the one who plots the most, and in the garbage time of the smartphone game, Ai Pin has opened up a new path.

When will Luo Yonghao and Zhang Huimin return to the team

"Smart Things" is the earliest prediction that generative intelligence will become the protagonist of the technical competition for Android and iPhone conferences?

Now the performance of several major manufacturers, let's predict the progress of the plot a little: don't expect OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi, these Android manufacturers, to make any progress in the field of real AI Phone.

So far, several large manufacturers have notified their own large-scale model parameter plans to the outside world. But the truth is that OpenAI's open-source system was retrained and a giant or small GPT model was published, which is not a real smartphone.

Ask the user to enter a paragraph and show a generated image, not a smartphone. Even, ordering food, taking a taxi, and navigating according to the user's voice command is not a real smart phone.

Smartphones will be a rearrangement of software, hardware and service ecosystems, and there is no way to enter a new era of smartphones with the heavy burden and shackles of the mobile Internet era.

Humane两位创始人认定的观念可以参考：our relationship with technology is changing profoundly, becoming even more personal as our devices morph into extensions of our bodies, minds, and hearts。

Sound familiar?

In the past month, an interesting incident in the North American technology industry has been ignored, Google and Apple have taken turns to testify in the US Congress, introducing the search function and business binding of the two companies, whether they involve monopoly.

The hearing revealed some of the information about the partnership: Google has benefited greatly from Apple's search partnership, but it has also come at a huge cost, with the two sides essentially sharing the benefits six to four, and then perhaps halved.

This is the binding of interests between representative hardware and representative software companies in the era of smartphones, and OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi, and Huawei are all in this form.

A journalist wrote a very interesting article about how Google is killing Apple's search ambitions? The answer is very simple, it is to use huge commercial partnerships to eliminate Apple's desire in this area.

OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi, and Huawei, are the same examples. The problem is that PPC-centered search is the biggest stumbling block for generative content like Chat GPT and the next era of smart services.

The fruit that can't be put down traps the monkey's hand. Android giants will watch themselves being grabbed by the new-age AI Phone entrepreneurs, and then watch their bodies be eaten.

Till death is unrealised.

Under the trend of AI Phone, what is the difference between Humane, as a startup, and Apple and Android giants?

The commercial interests of Apple and Android giants lie in the fact that if they want to make greater profits, they only need to sell more existing hardware, mobile phones with full screens, folding screens, periscope lenses, telescopic lenses, zoom lenses, and mobile phones with various lenses.

Garbage time for smartphone games has arrived

No matter what screen the phone is, it needs to be installed with Apple and Android app stores, as well as various waterfall browsers. No matter how much these manufacturers say they care about users, none of them allow them to delete their own app stores.

Apple says that it is a company that integrates software, hardware and services, and Android manufacturers say that they attach importance to user information security.

In addition to the maturity of hardware technology, another angle is that these new hardware platforms are by no means the most efficient and cost-effective hardware platforms that package Apple's core business interests.

Looking around, in addition to Huawei, the most powerful people in several major Android manufacturers, and the people closest to their respective bosses, control the Internet business revenue department. No matter how the product manager tosses, the App Store and the web waterfall browser are the forbidden and personal private domains of the bosses of various mobile phone manufacturers.

There is no shortage of creative product managers in Eastern societies, but who can grab their head and lift themselves off the ground?

The former Luo Yonghao and Zhang Huimin, especially the once more creative Huawei echelon, have proposed and demonstrated similar directions, and even come up with products that are closer to smartphones than Ai Pin. And the end?

However, the problem now is that Ai Pins do not have, or do not have, a strong commercial appeal like Google and Apple for the time being.

Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son can also be left without for the time being. In addition to Humane, Sam Altman has invested millions of dollars in another hardware startup.

"Zhiwu" once mentioned that the era of artificial intelligence cannot be born independently, but needs to be pinned on some kind of hardware and services, and now, the most likely and biggest opportunity is a car, or a mobile phone, and the others can only be vassals of these two platforms.

The biggest opportunity is how to integrate Chat GPT, an elegant software, into cars and mobile phones. Sam Altman could naturally envision himself as the leader, or one of the masters, of such a process, which was the beginning of the tragic fate of the Ai Pins, and was destined to be part of the end.

This is why "Zhiwu" has always felt that Huawei may be the only smart phone and smart car in China, and the potential Maker depends on how Yu Chengdong frees himself from Huawei's gravity, not to carve a boat for a sword and return to the peak of 2019, but to find a new path for Huawei's hardware platform, a new path that he once strongly opposed.

Supply chain sanctions have put Huawei in a difficult situation, but it has also removed the burden when Huawei transforms to a smart phone. Huawei now has no burden of scale, and does not need to rely on large-scale hardware sales to create Internet profits.

Tesla is another Maker worth paying attention to, because Musk also does not have the burden of Internet revenue.

Apple, on the other hand, has all the technical capabilities and hardware reserves, but under Cook's rule, Apple's Internet revenue has increased to 30%, the proportion of capital expenditure has dropped to 1%, and the number of mergers and acquisitions of entrepreneurial teams every year is approaching zero.

Will Luo Yonghao and Zhang Huimin, who were once the best or least burdened product managers in China, return to the team as soon as possible and return to the mobile game?

Regarding the game, "Zhiwu" once shared the conjecture of the mobile game with people in the industry. It was the Nokia phone that beat Nokia that was the least like Nokia, and the car that beat Toyota was the least Toyota.

I agree with a16z's recent view that technological optimism is the world's biggest driving force, not any financial and resource strength.

From the current point of view, Ai Pin is not a mobile phone in the typical sense, there is no full screen, no folding screen, no APP Store, but this is the beginning of a new game.